Job Market Paper
Children and Household Burden: The Influence of Pre-Birth Couple Norms
The arrival of a first child is a significant shock to a couple's household labor arrangement. How does this shock affect couples differently depending on their pre-birth division of housework, and what are the implications for individuals' well-being? Using rich longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, I categorize childless couples based on their division of housework before having children and estimate their differential responses to the arrival of their first child. I find a pattern of a larger increase in household work for women who did a smaller share before the birth. On average, regardless of pre-birth division of household labor, couples converge toward an arrangement where the female partner does the majority of the household labor after the first birth. Women from egalitarian couples experience the biggest increase in happiness post-birth, but the biggest decline in relationship satisfaction.
Working Paper
Childhood Immigrant Neighbors and Adult Integration, (with Brian Duncan, CU Denver, and Hani Mansour, CU Denver)
Does childhood contact with immigrants increase natives' willingness to integrate with them as adults? We answer this question using the sequential enumeration order of the 1930 U.S. Census, which lets us identify native boys who happened to live immediately next door to a foreign-born child. Conditional on county fixed effects and the spatial distribution of immigrant and native households along a given street, the nativity of the specific next-door neighbor is plausibly random. We find that boys who lived next to a foreign-born child were significantly more likely to marry a foreign-born spouse a decade later. The effect is driven by exposure to immigrant boys rather than girls, and is more than three times larger for exposure between ages 8-12 than for ages 13-17, consistent with a mechanism operating through childhood play and friendship rather than marriage-market access. These findings suggest that the assimilation of immigrants depends not only on their own efforts to integrate, but also on natives' willingness to welcome them.
Works in Progress
The Effect of Title IX-Induced Adjustment on Girls' Sports Involvement and Family Formation
Labor Market Effects of Postpartum Medicaid Expansion (with Megan Rice)
Stay-at-Home Fatherhood and Lifetime Household Income